Along with the recent proliferation of smartphones, the increasing popularity of social networking services such as Facebook, Twitter, and the like, and the rapid increase of mobile Internet traffic, mobile communication service providers have made efforts to handle the trend. Since it is expected that demands for mobile Internet traffic will increase every year in view of the popularity of smartphone-based large-capacity multimedia applications, mobility management for efficiently processing mobile traffic will attract more and more interest. The present Internet mobility control techniques are characterized by centralization based on a hierarchical network structure, which makes it difficult to satisfy the ever-increasing demands for mobile Internet traffic with these techniques. In this context, distributed mobility management (DMM) is under international standardization in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).
In the DMM scheme, there are a plurality of mobile agents (MAs) that manage a mobile node (MN) and thus the MAs should share location information about the MN. For this purpose, broadcasting/multicasting may be used, that is, each of all MAs may query the other MAs about the location of the MN. However, the multicasting increases unnecessary traffic. In another method, a query request may be routed to a specific MA using a distributed hash table (DHT). Despite the benefit of reduced traffic compared to the multicasting scheme, a delay time for processing a query request is increased and an additional overlay network for using the DHT should be configured, thereby increasing complexity. Also, if there are a large number of MNs, location information about the MNs is frequently changed due to movement of the MNs, resulting in the increase of query requests. As a consequence, both the schemes are not viable in processing traffic which is generated to share location information about an MN between MAs.
An object of the present invention devised to solve the conventional problem is to provide a method and apparatus for reducing traffic generated to share location information about an MN between MAs, while minimizing complexity.